Re: Language = Namespace. was: How namespace names might be used

TimBL wrote:

 ...some sensible stuff about what a "language" is...

The bad news is that I think it's going to be tough to attain consensus no
matter how rough as to what a language is or should be.  The good news is
we probably don't need it.  We can agree that XHTML and SVG are languages
in any remotely useful sense of the word, and that neither the chair I'm 
sitting on nor the contents of, for example, http://www.salon.com are.

Thus it is clear that not all resources are languages.

>- a namespace corresponds to a language.  I know that some don't want this
>model but honestly without it all work on XML should stop immediately and be
>restarted with a proper footing. What is XHTML? a Language! That is actually
>what the letter stands for. There is meaning in it.  The meaning is NOT
>carried by out of band discussion, it is carried in the XHTML specification.

I don't know what "corresponds to" means.  I know what "provides a 
guaranteed-unique name for" means, and that's what I thought namespaces were 
for.  I know what "describes the display semantics of" means, and I know 
what "renders onto a wide range of display devices" means, and I know what 
"assigns abstract properties using a 3-tuple based architecture" (ie RDF) 
means.  But I don't know what "corresponds to" means.

XHTML is a language.  That language has a namespace, which in my view
is most usefully put to work as a name to enable software that knows how to 
deal with it to recognize it.

>- a namesapce is identified by a URI.  (That is, if any resource is
>identified by URI u, and a namespace is identified by URI u, then that
>resource *is* that namespace)

So... the resource which is to be found by dereferencing 
   http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
*is* the XHTML namespace.

I don't understand what that means.

This seems central to the disagreement.

If we agreed that namespace names were just names, then we would have a
basis for building a rough consensus.  But clearly some of us don't.
If we agreed that they were something more, and had a pretty crisp 
description of what that was, and that this was more important than the 
original goal of naming, once again we could move forward.  But some of
us either want to stay in the "just-names" space, and others aren't
comfortable with "something more" without more details. 

Inspiration, someone? -Tim

Received on Monday, 19 June 2000 19:24:02 UTC